For Republican leaders it was, perhaps, the worst of all possible worlds.
A victory for Donald Trump in the US presidential election would have preserved their power. A landslide defeat might have eviscerated Trumpism and finally broken the spell, giving them leverage to steer the party in a new direction.
But neither of these scenarios happened. Trump gained more than 72m votes, beating his 2016 total and every presidential candidate in history other than his opponent, Democrat Joe Biden, who topped 77m to clinch the White House.
It was hardly the repudiation of Trumpism that many had hoped for. It leaves the 74-year-old soon-to-be ex-president intact as the dominant figure in his party, an albatross around the neck of every Republican. There has been no better illustration than their awkward complicity with Trump’s refusal to accept the election result.
“No doubt his hold over the Republican party will be stronger next year than it is this year,” said Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman from Illinois. “Biden won but Trump won too because he gets to keep his lie that this election was stolen from him. As long as he gets to say that, all of his supporters will believe him and then the Republican party will be beholden to him.”
A brash businessman and reality TV star, Trump staged a hostile takeover of the party of Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan in 2016, knocking out 16 major candidates in the primaries in what amounted to a fierce rebuke of the Republican establishment. It was widely assumed he would then be demolished by the vastly more experienced Hillary Clinton, yet he pulled off a narrow victory in the electoral college.
Despite a four-year presidency of extraordinary turbulence, regarded by critics as a deadly combination of incompetence and malevolence, Trump continued to reshape the party in his own image. He also proved a formidable election campaigner with an onslaught of rallies where his “America first” positions on trade, immigration and foreign policy resonated with his base.
He outperformed opinion polls for a second time and gained among Latino and Black voters, according to early exit poll data. Many Republicans believe that, but for a once-in-a-century pandemic and the economic havoc it wreaked, Trump would have been re-elected. The party also won seats in the House of Representatives and, depending on two runoffs in Georgia in January, is favored to retain control of the Senate, confounding predictions that Trump would drag it down.
Walsh, who unsuccessfully challenged the president in this year’s Republican primary, believes Trump will continue to loom large. “Trump got his people out and they’re more devoted to him now than they were before the election,” he said. “It means that Trump and Trumpism dominate the party, period. This cemented the deal that the Republican party is his.
